Demythtification

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"Every era tells the Trojan War legend a little differently. That's only natural. Homer's Iliad features the gods directly influencing the action—even joining in some of the battles. I've gone so far as to shove the gods offstage... I've chosen to downplay the supernatural element in order to emphasize the human element."

Parallel to External Retcon: taking a legend and revealing what 'really' happened by stripping all the fantastic elements out of it (or, at the very least, renders them Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane so that they do not have to be fantastic). This sometimes falls flat, because without the gods and magic, the audience might wonder what the point is. If King Arthur is just another warlord with no Lady of the Lake and no Merlin, he had better be made an interesting character in his own right.

Filmmakers sometimes forget this second part. In particular, the onus is on the writer to make the "imagined" historical events at least as interesting as whatever actually inspired the legend (and the actual events sometimes weren't).

This technique is often used to give an adaptation a grittier and more realistic feel in situations when it is perceived that the fantastic elements in the traditional version might seem too whimsical or even silly to the intended audience.

This tends, as a rule, to be a retelling of the legend in its current form. As a consequence, it can explain the "real history" behind figures who obviously had no real history in the story, because they were introduced to the legend later - even centuries later. Frequent examples include Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, and Alan-a-Dale in Robin Hood storiesnote Little John, Much the Miller's son, and Will Scarlet (or Scathelock, Scarlock, Scarlet, Stukeley, Stuteley, etc.) are his oldest companions, and Lancelot and Galahad in King Arthur talesnote Bedivere, Kay, and the greatest of them all, Gawain, are the oldest "proto-knights of the Round Table".

When stripping away the fantastic happens within the same fictional universe that had the fantastic elements in the first place, that's Doing In the Wizard, which is a sister trope.

When a writer takes definitely historical accounts and reimagines what actually happened, it is Historical Fiction (or Alternate History if the changes are great enough). When a writer makes a subtle reference to actual history in a work of fiction, it is a Historical In-Joke.

Arthurian Legend

In Vinland SagaAskeladd is the last remaining direct descendant of King Arthur, who was really named Artorius Castus. (Same as the King Arthur film, which it might have referenced.)

Comic Books

In Don Rosa's The Once and Future Duck Gyro, Donald Duck and his nephews go back in time and runs into the (extremely unheroic) warlord Arturius Riothamas (King Arthur) and his bard Myrdin (Merlin). They also accidentally create the basis for the legends of the Holy Grail and Excalibur. The main characters manage to thwart Arturius and flee back to the future, but in the end, Myrdin decides to make the entire incident look like a great victory and create a heroic song about "King Arturius and his Narts of the Round Stable", promising that it will be a huge hit in the future. It is based on a genuine theory about the "historic" Arthur.

Fan Fiction

Diaries of a Madman plays with this. Several human myths are actually true, including Merlin, whereas others such as legends surrounding several of the human gods are instead revealed to be powerful mages.

Film

King Arthur (2004) attempts (the keyword being: attempts) to present a historically accurate version of the Arthurian legends. No mean feat: the evidence is vague and contradictory. The film takes the Sarmatian Hypothesis and runs with it, stripping out all magical elements in the process. Some elements are right despite seeming wrong. But most are more the product of the the Eiffel Tower Effect: Hadrian's Wall as the site for the battle of Badon.

First Knight is still technically a fantasy film with no attempt made to ground it in real places, but it also strips the Arthurian length down to a group of knights, their leader, the Big Bad and his horde, and a Love Triangle. No magical sword bestowed by some watery tart — or any other magic elements, like Merlin. Like at the end, Arthur isn't taken to mystic Avalon by fey women, he just gets a Viking Funeral.

Literature

N.M. Browne's Warriors of Camlann (sequel to Warriors of Alvana). There are elements of magic, but it tries to address historically plausible explanations for Camelot and Arthur. Though good luck, at points, figuring out who is who with all the alternate naming.

The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. Nimue, Morgan and Merlin's "magic" is a masterful mix of psychology, timing and chutzpah. The Unreliable Narrator is predisposed to believe in pagan magic, and believes every trick, Merlin and co. pull until Merlin explains in detail how he did it. Sometimes he still believes, despite the explanation. Similarly, pagan ceremonial magic is a mix of psychology, showmanship, trickery, and taking credit for natural occurrences.

Andre Norton's novella "Pendragon: Artos, Son of Marius" - one of the quartet of stories in Dragon Magic - is set in post-Roman Britain. It ends with an explanation of the later legends of Arthur's death - he was secretly buried in such a way as to give his followers hope of his eventual return.

Terry Pratchett has a subversion in the story "Once and Future"; of course Merlin isn't really a wizard, he's a time traveller! The stone holding the sword is an electromagnet. (It's also made clear that, even without magic, the Anachronism Stew of Arthurian Britain isn't any history Mervin's familiar with.)

Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur tells the story of how Merlin (not a wizard) built up the legend of Arthur (not a hero, but a common warlord, and a fairly stupid one at that) using a web of deceit and the help of the book's young protagonist.

Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset is another stripped-down Arthurian retelling (in fact, one of the first.) This one does contain much more historical plausibility and historical research than the movie King Arthur, though it is left deliberately ambiguous if the "curse" put on Artorius is supernatural or just psychological.

Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court portrays the magic in the Arthurian legend as fraudsters (including the title character) fooling the ignorant. Also subverted, when said title character falls unconscious for 1500 years so that he can personally deliver the story to Twain.

Elizabeth E. Wein's The Winter Prince deals with such characters of the Arthurian Legend as Artos (Arthur), Medraut (Mordred) and Queen Morgause (Morgaine) without any magic or magical swords at all. It is about people.

Abrahamic Religions

Manga and Anime

Neon Genesis Evangelion presents the Dead Sea Scrolls as being left by the god-like alien who seeded Earth with life; this is the justification for the use of Biblical names and symbols used for the "Angels".

Film

The Man from Earth: while the movie has one supernatural element on which the whole story is based, the way it explains the myth of Jesus is quite realistic.

Not supernatural as much as highly speculative. The characters themselves discuss whether it would be scientifically plausible for a man to stop ageing and live indefinitely. They conclude that it's theoretically possible, if highly unlikely.

The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. This is a borderline case, however, as more than one interpretation is offered for the Visions, and indeed implied for 'the Conscience'. Of course, since Joan of Arc was definitely a real person, The Messenger might also be accused of going the opposite route and adding fantastic elements (though this gets into a tricky theological debate).

The Ten Commandments mini-series stripped bare the story of Moses.

Monty Python's Life of Brian, despite expectations, actually subverts this. It follows the whacky misadventures of a man that is repeatedly mistaken for a prophet in Roman Galilee, from his adoration by the Three Wisemen to his crucifixion by the Romans, and shows (accurately) that there were many self proclaimed prophets in that time and place. The movie does not make comment on Jesus' nature, however, and he stays offscreen except for one scene early in the movie where he is seen addressing people from the top of a hill. Despite this, many censorers considered the film blasphemous and it was denied a release in several countries for decades.

Most translations of the Book of Exodus heavily imply that the Pharaoh's court magicians possessed some degree of genuine magical abilities, which allowed them to replicate all of Moses' miracles until the Ten Plagues left them too weak to do magic. For the story's original audience, the intended message was likely that there were many forms of magic in the world, but none of them were as powerful as God's divine miracles. In the movie, Ramses' court magicians Hotep and Huy are shown to be simple illusionists who use sleight of hand and stagecraft to make people think they can perform miracles, while Moses' miracles are the real deal.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago is basically Jesus's entire history, from his conception to his crucifixion and death, told without absolutely anything divine or miraculous. As you can imagine, the Roman Catholic Church didn't like it, starting off because he was conceived by Joseph and Mary through normal sex instead of through divine intervention from the Holy Spirit.

The Jefferson Bible was an attempt by no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson, a Deist who considered Jesus to be a great moral teacher but had a strong dislike for organized religion, to strip the Gospels of their more "fantastic" elements. Deism was a philosophy common in the 18th century that denied the existence of miracles and perceived God as a "cosmic watchmaker" who creates the laws of nature and carries out His will in accordance with them. It still exists but is much less popular and influential than at its peak, and is best recognized today for its influence on Unitarianism.

Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief does much the same as it tries to infer the life and teachings of Jesus without the myths that Tolstoy believed to be later applied to them. Tolstoy goes through with this more thoroughly than Jefferson however as he applies it not only to what passages he includes and excludes, but also to the entire translation proses itself.

Act of God, similar in style to The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail, raises the hypothesis that the Thera eruption was responsible for the Exodus story. From plagues to Pillar of Smoke By Day, Pillar of Fire by Night, the idea is an interesting one.

Shulamith Hareven's The Miracle Hater is a mostly naturalistic retelling of Exodus, a historical depiction of a desert tribe who don't yet have the kind of religion that Judaism would eventually develop into.

In Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain, some of the famous miracles Moses performs in The Bible while leading the Hebrews out of Egypt are really tricks he learned from his first trip into Midian: he crosses the Red Sea because of his knowledge of tides and strikes water from a stone by finding a spring he had once encountered. However, some of his miracles are still as fantastic as the biblical version, and from Moses's perspective there is no difference between them: they're all just applications of his vast knowledge of nature.

The Red Tent does this with the story of Dinah (daughter of Jacob) in the Old Testament. In this story, instead of Dinah being raped by the prince of Shechem, they had a consensual relationship that her brothers didn't approve of. Instead of Jacob's visions and name change (to Israel) being seen as from God, they are seen as a man slowly going crazy as his family falls apart.

The whole "genre" of Ancient Astronauts theories concerns itself with on explaining old myths and religious stories, but Abrahamic religions and the pagan mythologies of their original Semitic believers tend to steal the spotlight. To be specific, these stories are considered fanciful accounts of, like, totally mundane stuff like human-alien interaction. Nothing fantastic at all!

King Jesus by Robert Graves, which mixes the canonical and non-canonical Christian gospels, presents Jesus not as the son of God but the secret grandson of Herod. Though he does perform miracles and is resurrected at the end.

Assassin's Creed: There is no God or afterlife, all the supposed miracles that occurred throughout history were illusions caused by pieces of lost Precursor technology stolen by Adam and Eve, who were slaves to said precursors.

Fairy Tales

Film

Ever After does this for the "Cinderella" fairytale, the story in a somewhat more down to Earth environment devoid of external magic. The Cinderella character is Danielle, a French noblewoman who's reduced to servanthood by her stepmother and one of her stepsisters after her dad dies. The crystal slippers actually are based on the shoes that belong to Danielle's Missing Mom and the Pimped-Out Dress was made by humans, not by magic. There's no Fairy Godmother... but there is a Cool Old Guy and sorta Crazy Inventor Godfather, who's none other than Leonardo da Vinci. To go to the Ball, Danielle gets help from her other stepsister Jacqueline as well as the family servants. The Prince, Henry, is a flawed human being with both pros and contras, and he doesn't take the revelation about Danielle being a "commoner" well, so Leonardo has to give him a harsh pep talk before he goes apologize to her.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire also does this (excellently) with "Cinderella".

Theatre

Rossini's opera La Cenerentola tells the story of Cinderella minus the magical elements. As in Ever After, the Fairy Godmother figure is a Cool Old Guy, in this case the prince's tutor Alidoro. The glass slippers are replaced by a pair of matching bracelets, and instead of having to leave the ball at midnight, Cinderella chooses to leave to make the prince search for her and test whether or not he'll accept her even in rags.

In Age of Bronze, Eric Shanower's graphic novel series based on the The Iliad, the gods don't appear, and there's no evidence that they actually exist in the world of the adaptation. This is deliberate, as the afterword makes clear. Also, Helen of Troy is only fairly attractive, not beautiful (but she is very conscious about her image and spends a lot of time on her dressing and makeup; this, coupled with her exotic appeal and personality, is what makes all of Troy fall in love with her). Odysseus and Agamemnon decide to say she's the most beautiful woman in the world because the Hellene soldiers will fight more willingly than they would for the real reasons for the war, which are more complicated and less glamorous.

The series is specifically set in the 12th century BC (the time the events that inspired Homer, who wrote around 800 BC, are believed to have happened) and there is great attention to detail to make architecture, dress, weapons, etc. be true to the period. So while the Homeric names, personalities and relations between characters are kept intact, these are cosmetically as far from any other adaptation of the Illiad, usually based on the Classical Greece of 500 BC or later, as they can be. The Achaeans are Mycenaean Greeks, and Troy is mostly Hittite with some leftover Minoan influences.

Nymphs like Oenone and Tethys appear, but they are just wise women that engage in healing and divination. They are divided in orders that worship different gods; as a result, they call themselves "daughters" of said gods.

The earlier sack of Troy by Heracles (aka Hercules) is narrated differently by a bitter Priam. Heracles is an Achaean warlord (though one so popular that he is treated "like a god" by his men) and he raids Troy after getting in "a dispute over a couple of horses" with Priam's father, Laomedon. Priam's sister Hesione is not saved from Human Sacrifice but taken as war bounty.

The Judgement of Paris is a dream. A dream Paris claims to have had, anyway, during a long, seductive speech he makes to Helen.

Cheiron, while called a centaur, is a big, hairy Mountain Man rather than a half man, half horse creature.

Agamemnon does not kidnap the Oenotropae (goddesses of seed, wine and oil) to feed his army. He docks in Delos and uses its vast food reserves, deposited there as temple offers by the other Greeks. The comic's Oenotropae are in fact not godesses, but three priestesses that manage said offers, which is why their father Anius calls them the bringers of wealth to his island. Anius is addressed as son of a god - because he is a priest of Apollo.

Helen is really the daughter of Tyndareus. Her mother believes Helen was hatched from an egg after she had intercourse with Zeus in the form of a swan because she is insane. However, in the world of the comic the story has already taken life of its own and translated into a rumor that Helen is of divine origin.

The exceptions are the many prophecies of doom. Cassandra's, of course, are the most detailed and accurate, but true to Mythology, they are taken for incoherent ramblings and not believed.

Most disturbing is how Cassandra got the gift of premonition. She believes Apollo appeared to her when she fell asleep at the temple as a child, but this is actually a distorted memory of her assault by a pedophile. He told her that nobody would believe her (about the incident), but she mistook it as a curse making her not being ever believed by anyone, about anything. This makes Cassandra's curse a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: She acts crazy because she fears no one will believe her, and people don't believe her because she acts crazy.

Film

Troy purposefully strips out the prominent supernatural elements of the original poems — or renders them ambiguous. The gods are never seen, and never act, despite their large roles as Physical Gods in Homers telling. Achilles is a Nay-Theist who pooh-poohs the gods at every turn. Hector, of all people, paraphrases Stalin: "How many battalions does the sun god command?" The priest of Apollo acts as an inverted Cassandra — he always gives exactly the wrong advice and is always believed.

More ambiguously, Achilles' mother could be a goddess (well, one who really doesn't know the original version would think she is simply a seer rather than a goddess) or a strange but wise woman. Achilles' blasphemy tends to be followed by bad luck, and of course he is shot in both the heel and the chest when he dies, so we still don't know which arrow killed him. There are many other changes from the original plays unrelated to the trope.

In general, the film seems to interpret anything where the gods would be involved as a metaphor or exaggeration. This isn't too far from how some historians view it, with a common reading being that any kind of major feat or unlikely event would be credited to the gods - for instance, a passage going something like "Athena blocked a spear thrown at Achilles" could be read as "the spear thrown at Achilles miraculously missed him."

Hercules2014. A constant theme of the movie is legend vs reality. The adventures of Hercules shown in the film are purported to be the "truth behind the legend", with fantastic elements rationalised as hallucinations or fanciful inventions/exaggerations though some things like Amphiarus' visions are treated as real.

Literature

David Gemmell's Troy series dispenses with the gods so prominent in the original plays.

Dares Phryx (5th or 6th c. CE) and Dictys Cretensis (2nd or 3d c. CE) both wrote more-or-less realistic narratives of The Trojan War, with a strong sense that this is the later-corrupted "real story" (both authors' pseudonyms are names used in Homer — they're presented as eyewitness accounts by Trojan War veterans); e.g., in Dares, rather than using a giant wooden horse, the Greeks enter Troy through a gate decorated with a picture of a horse.

The King Must Die and The Bull From the Sea, Mary Renault's novels about Theseus. Successful in that Renault does make Theseus a complex and compelling character in his own right. She also succeeds in capturing much of the spirit of the myth because her first person narrator, Theseus, believes in the gods and their influence in his life, even if none of the book's events are depicted as blatantly supernatural - modern readers would interpret them quite differently.

Robert Graves

Hercules My Shipmate retells the story of Jason and Argonauts. The gods are real for the characters but their physical reality is not clear.

Homer's Daughter is based on Samuel Butler's theory that the Odyssey was written by a young woman, who based it on her own realistic experiences, and based the character of Nausicaa on herself.

A footnote in House of Leaves, containing an idea that a character in the book thought up and then abandoned, explains the Minotaur as King Minos' deformed son — the body of a man, the head "of a bull"- who was born so ugly that Minos would publicly accuse his wife of bestiality rather than accept his son as an heir. The labyrinth was a prison so complex, with the Minotaur himself being "gentle and misunderstood," that the Athenians who were "fed" to the Minotaur died mostly of starvation. Guess what the author of that idea (and, hypothetically, King Minos) thinksofTheseus.

Ursula K. LeGuin's novel Lavinia is a mostly realistic version of Vergil's "Aeneid," though it does add the supernatural touch of Lavinia having proleptic conversations with the spirit of Vergil. By the end, Lavinia has learned how to use people's perception of the supernatural to her advantage.

Older Than Feudalism: There is a book called "On Incredible Tales" by one Palaephatus (an ancient Greek author). A nice reading, if you suffer from a really bad case of insomnia.

C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The jealousy of Ungit (Venus) for Istra (Psyche)'s beauty is presented as the jealousy of the priest of Ungit for drawing away worshippers. Psyche's "marriage" to the god of the Grey Mountain (Cupid) is being chained to a tree on the side of a mountain as a sacrifice. Orual later finds Istra living on the mountainside, clearly insane and claiming to live in a palace that Orual cannot see. Turns out to be a subversion, as Orual later sees the god with her own eyes.This trope is actually discussed within the story, as Greek philosophy is taking hold and some of the characters themselves are Euhemerists. A younger high priest of Ungit speculates that the stories of Ungit being both the mother and the lover of the God of the Grey Mountain are just allegorical ways of saying the earth (Ungit) creates the air, which in turn nourishes the earth with rain. The heroine silently wonders why they bother to wrap that up in a myth, if that's all the myth is saying.

The short story "The Gardens of Tantalus" by Brian Stableford, collected in Classical Whodunnits, is a Demythification of the Lamia incident in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, in which the "lamia" is a human, but metaphorically venomous, Femme Fatale, and Apollonius's own "magic" is a combination of natural philosophy and common sense. The story is supposedly written by a student of Apollonius, who is tired of mythological tales attaching themselves to a rationalist philosopher.

A few stories in The Lost Books of the Odyssey present the story of The Odyssey as one put together by far more mundane sources, such as Odysseus as a wandering bard, who ended The Trojan War in a matter of months but spins out a far grander tale to get away from the boredom of kingship.

Live-Action TV

Hallmark's miniseries Hercules (2005). The existence of the Gods made rather ambiguous (Hercules being fathered by an escaped prisoner of war with a lightning shaped scar), but they do throw in mythical creatures of Ancient Greece. It's heavily arbitrary on when to dismiss the fantastic. In addition, Hercules' Super Strength and fighting prowess is explained as a Charles Atlas Superpower brought on by Training from Hell.

The BBC documentary Atlantis: End of a World, Birth of a Legend is actually a dramatized retelling of the Thera Eruption around 1628 BC, which is identified both as the reason for the decline of the Minoan civilization and the inspiration of the myth of Atlantis. The narrator - only one who ever says "Atlantis" - likens Plato's description of the Atlantean capital being built in concentric rings of land and water to Santorini (Thera)'s shape◊.

Video Games

Empire Earth zigzags this for its Greek campaign. The first level has a village chieftain named Hierakles leading his people to a new land where they build a temple and a city on top of a hill (the Acropolis), the Trojan War is fought without divine intervention, while Theseus was a leader of Athens who united the outlying city-states against Sparta and Thebes. The last (of very few) supernatural events is when Theseus ascends to become a god; this marks the campaign moving from being based on Greek myth to being based on history.

European, Asian, American Mythology

Anime & Manga

Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series often features this, despite the title character being an immortal god-bird. Many characters in the earlier historical chapters are gods and other figures from Japanese Mythology re-imagined as ordinary humans and Strange Beings & Robe of Feathers imply that various mythical creatures are actually aliens or time travelers. Tezuka dispensed with this as time went on, however, with the final completed volume, Sun featuring such oddities as battles between Youkais and Bodhisattvas and retconning the alien angle out of the aforementioned Strange Beings (although Sun goes back and forth between the past and the (then) future of 2008, and it's entirely possible the part bits are an hallucination).

Kyogoku Natsuhiko Kosetsu Hyaku Monogatari features a strange subversion where a trio of outright supernatural beings are using their powers to fake or perpetuate myths of other supernatural beings. Through the series many myths and legends are examined and many of them are simply the trio using trickery to fool others. For example a sociopathic murderer is explained away as a tanuki, a shapeshifting badger dog, who is suffering from Shapeshifter Modelock.

Ballads

The Tale of Two Sisters, found across much of Europe, is usually some variant of this: Two sisters loved the same man, who was engaged to the younger. The older one arranged to have her drown so she would inherit the engagement. The body of the younger girl is found by a bard (who may mistake her for a swan) and uses her bones or hair to make a harp or fiddle. The bard is invited to play at the older one's wedding and brings along the instrument, but before the ceremony starts it sings out what happened in the girl's voice. However one Gaelic version removes the animated instrument by having the married sister compose and sing the song while the tide rises around her, which the other hears and later sings to her stepchildren, and the widow overhears her.

Film

The Dark Knight Saga strips the world of Batman of fantasy elements. Batman fights many sci-fi and supernatural characters in the source continuities. In this version, arch-foes like Ras Al Ghul and the Joker are given much less fantastic backstories. The Joker is given less backstory, period. And Ra's is revealed to be not one immortal man but the latest successor in the long line of leaders of the League of Shadows, all calling themselves Ra's al Ghul, and any fantastic abilities are chalked up to a hallucinogenic flower.

Although it's basically Historical Fiction, and accurate in many respects (less so in others...), Kingdom of Heaven has tendencies towards this school of film-making with respect to the legends of the Crusades. However, the Director's Cut of the movie heavily implies that the Hospitaller is an angel.

Literature

The 13th Warrior (originally titled Eaters of the Dead) combines the story of Beowulf with Ahmed ibn Fadlan's 10th century travelogue of Europe. In this story, ibn Fadlan joins a Norse rescue mission to face a seemingly supernatural enemy. Instead of Grendel, the enemy is a tribe of cannibalistic Neanderthals. Grendel's mother is replaced by the tribe's matriarch. The dragon is just an optical illusion created by Neanderthal raiders carrying torches as they stream down from their mountain lair. However, the story does dabble in some standard wise woman prophecy and mysticism (in the book done by dwarves, who are real humans with dwarfism).

Baudolino by Umberto Eco does this with the "conspiracy" version of the various Grail and Templar legends surrounding the Crusades - the same material that Eco dealt with earlier in Foucault's Pendulum. The historical conspiracy is replaced by two petty criminals and forgers trying to make a profit by selling fake relics. Although it's clearly fiction, and the way that these two characters come up with nearly all the Dan Brown stuff on their own without planning is meant as a joke, the gist of it must be closer to reality than the organised, large-scale conspiracy version.

Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, one of the major sources for Norse Mythology, uses this technique in the prologue. As a 13th century Christian, Snorri advanced the theory that the Norse gods were warriors who left Troy after it was destroyed, travelling to Northern Europe where their advanced knowledge meant they became chieftains. After they died, hero cults arose around their tombs, which eventually led to them being worshipped as gods. The same outlook is also presented in another work attributed to Snorri, "Ynglinga Saga", the first section of Heimskringla, but here, the Aesir are not identified with surviving Trojans, but an unrelated people whose home city Asgard was located somewhere in southern Russia or the Caucasus, and who migrated northwards to evade Roman imperialism (about a millennium after the destruction of Troy). As Heimskringla is about a decade younger than the Prose Edda, it seems Snorri eventually dismissed the identity of the Norse gods with the Trojans.

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol story "Brave To Be A King", Manse finds that the Moses in the Bulrushes legend is being told about Cyrus the Great in his lifetime, and learns that the actual Cyrus was exposed and killed, and the recovered one was actually the time traveler Manse was looking for. To keep history on track, they go back and intimidate the grandfather out of trying to kill Cyrus — so that the legend must have become attached to Cyrus at a later date.

The first Doctor Who New Adventures novel featured the Doctor and Ace wandering into the middle of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu is a neanderthal, Gilgamesh is a perfectly human Boisterous Bruiser... and Utnapishtim is an alien starship captain, his flood-defying ark is a spacecraft, and the Scorpion Men are robots with lasers. Oh, and Ishtar is being impersonated by an alien criminal who Utnapishtim is trying to hunt down.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash posits that Sumerian mythology and the Babel story are distorted retellings of real events surrounding the fragmentation of language.

The Darth Bane trilogy does this to an extent internally within the Star Wars universe, though it is still a case of this and not Doing In the Wizard. Originally the story of the Battle of Ruusan and the rise of Darth Bane was told in a pair of comic books that had elements more in line with Lord of the Rings than Star Wars including what appeared to be sailing ships in space and bows and arrows alongside lightsabers that felt extremely out of place in Star Wars. This was fixed in the Drew Karpyshyn novels that changed those elements to be more in line with the movies as well as the game Knights of the Old Republic(that actually took place chronologically earlier), which is by no coincidence written by the same author. It also has Force powers that are between the absurd mythic elements of the comic books and the movies in terms of abilities. Within the novel Bane even comments about how unrealistic some of the extreme Force abilities appear.

"Frost and Thunder" by Randall Garrett has the main character time-transported to ancient Scandanavia. He uses his pistol to help the locals defeat the "giants" before being returned to the present. Afterwards, he muses that he was probably assumed to be a god — specifically, Thor, with his "hammer" that creates thunder, kills distant enemies, and returns to his hand

Dexter has pretty much dropped the demonic elements from the books, and made it a (relatively) more conventional series. Well, a conventional series with a serial killer protagonist. He does later refer to his "dark passenger" but only in a figurative sense, not an actual demon.

Doctor Who does this occasionally. Almost any supernatural element in the show is explained as either alien or extradimensional. Even vampires turn out to be alien fish using perception filters to appear human. The "teeth" are the product of human subconscious trying to warn the person of a threat. (At least, some vampires are. Othervampires are actually blood-sucking, The Virus-spreading monsters, repelled by faith [a "psychic barrier"] or garlic [or "garil", which is space-garlic], and only killable by driving a stake through the heart. But they're still from space or the future, so that's okay.)

Vikings uses Norse sagas that feature monsters and supernatural events as part of its source material, but gives the supernatural elements of them a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane approach (sometimes leaning farther into Unexplainably Magic with its prophecies). No one questions that Aslaug is the daughter of Sigurd the dragonslayer and Brynhild the Valkyrie, but whether they actually are her parents or even existed is left ambiguous. The show integrates the legendary inspirations with other historical sources, and often changes around both to fit its needs.

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